


Circles

by blue_sun



Series: Twice A Year [5]
Category: Twilight Series - All Media Types
Genre: Babies, Canada, F/M, Family Drama, Found Family, Original Character(s), Pregnancy, Werewolves, actual werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-22
Updated: 2019-09-19
Packaged: 2020-09-23 17:46:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 22
Words: 20,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20344159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blue_sun/pseuds/blue_sun
Summary: Following the self-destruction of her family, Angela sets about building something new, in another country if necessary--even though history is a black pit that inevitably repeats itself. Blood will out.Ch 22: At the end of all things, it’s Christmas again.





	1. #8 Circles

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Last multi-chapter instalment in this series, I promise. Please understand, I literally started this as a way to check off one of those '100 Themes Challenges' and it never stopped growing.

Fifteen minutes until Angela climbed onto a bus and this was a memory. A flash of green drew her eye down the platform: young woman in a paisley headscarf and tightly-belted military coat flirting with a man leaning on a guitar case. From his body language, he was hoping the chance meeting would grow into something more satisfying during the long bus ride to the border. Angela found it funny how much more aware of body language she was than eight years earlier. She supposed that was to be expected; shapeshifters were so much more sensitive to telegraphing than regular people.

Ten minutes until the bus arrived. Thunder rumbled somewhere in the distance and the cooing of pigeons on the station eaves paused. At the far end of the platform, the girl with the headscarf gave her a curious look, but turned away when Angela looked her straight in the eyes. Their colour matched her scarf.

The baby kicks in Angela’s belly. The green-eyed girl was suddenly beside her.

Angela jumped so hard part of her skin landed in Russia and she was half out of her chair before the girl made a shushing motion. Angela stared at her wide-eyed and wary.

The girl smiled. “The bus is loading. Would you like help with your bags? I don’t have any of my own besides this.” A half-empty hiking pack swung from her shoulder. She couldn’t be much younger than Angela, but there was an ageless cast to her eyes.

Angela considered carefully. With her now-protruding pregnant belly there was no way she would be able to manoeuvre her bags in the tight spaces onboard without help.

Sensing no resistance, the girl favoured her with another cloud-piercing smile and took the handle of the big case.

“You don’t have any siblings, do you?” Angela was half-joking, but she caught a flicker of shadow over the girl’s face before she shook her head.

Her smile was rueful. “Only child. Sort of.”

“Oh? Lucky. I have two brothers,” said Angela.

“Older or younger?”

“Younger. Twins.”

The girl made a face. “Better that way,” she said sagely. “Older brothers are always trying to tell you what to do.”

“But you said you’re an only child?”

“Sort of,” she repeated. “We’re… estranged. We have been for a very long time. Where are you sitting?”

Angela filed away for later considering how long ‘a very long time’ might be to a woman who looked barely twenty. The bus wasn’t crowded once everyone was loaded, but few had the privilege of two seats to themselves. Angela expected the girl to go sit with Guitar Man but she didn’t. He peered across the aisle at her with wounded expression and sulkily stuffed headphones into his ears.

It was two days after Christmas and everyone was untalkative. The bus settled into silence. Rain began to patter and then pour as the bus pulled out of the station into sparse early afternoon traffic.

The girl leaned in. “He was full of himself,” she whispered cheekily. She nodded at Guitar Man.

She and Angela had apparently forged a secret-sharing bond. Angela felt as though she should protest; she didn’t feel like bonding, she felt like curling up in a corner and dying, however much _lighter_ she felt to be free of the drowning well of Washington.

But there was something about the girl. She was pretty in a way that gave Angela pause; lively like she had a thousand years of solar fusion buzzing under her skin. Angela had met the sort before, but contrarily this girl didn’t strike her as flighty. There was a solidity to her that makes Angela think that however big the dandelion-head was, the roots went deep.

The girl was grinning at her conspiratorially. Cute, she was saying of Guitar Man, maybe talented. But for a ‘serious musician’ he made a lot of references to his ‘clever fingers’.

Angela smiled politely and evaded the follow-up questions on her own romantic history, busying herself with setting up book, water, and snacks in easy reach. The storm was settling in for the long haul, and streetlights sputtered to life as they passed. Rain washed the windows in sheets; visibility outside was reduced to a dreamy blur of colours and shapes. Inside the bus became surreal.

Angela was finally _out_. It was over.

Part of her wanted to cry. Instead she studied a fading stamp on the girl’s wrist.

“I’m Chrissy,” the girl said, offering on her hand.

“Angela.”

The stamp appeared and disappeared in flashes of streetlight as Chrissy talked, gesticulating with low-pitched energy. It looked like a club stamp: a lotus in a circle of illegible text. 

Circles. Always circles. On Angela’s own hand, there was a ring of skin ever-so-faintly lighter than the rest of her hand. She couldn’t stop her glance down as her thumb skimmed it. The answering pang in her chest was sharp and sudden. She looked up the aisle instead. Beside her, Chrissy pulled off her headscarf and shook out a tumble of curls. She finger-combed knots and snarls out of their ends as she talked.

Once again, her appearance struck Angela. In the dim overhead lights she looked brunette, but flashes from outside showed her to be a redhead. A streetlight blinked by and rimed her profile with gold. The way her features fitted together reminded Angela of something out of silent movies, and there was something familiar about it that she couldn’t put down to Mary Pickford or Gloria Swanson. For a split second she was back in Forks. The light past and the vision is gone. The resemblance lingered.

Or perhaps Angela was seeing what she wanted to: another fine-boned girl with curling hair and a wayward smile. Maybe she was imprinting the past onto the present. It had happened before.

Heck, for all she knew it might be hormones and fatigue contriving to make her see ghosts everywhere. Again she touched the nakedness of her index finger without thinking.

From the way Chrissy’s eyes followed the movement, she understood. Something in her face told Angela that Chrissy had guessed more than Angela has said. But Chrissy didn’t ask. And she didn’t patronise, or offer advice or consolation.

In fact she might have been the first person Angela had spoken to in six months who didn’t pity her her pregnancy, her husband, or both. The freshness of that nearly took Angela’s breath away.

Her rationality warns her to be wary and reserved, but she found herself drawn to the girl, saying more than she intended. Oddly she found that once it was out, she didn’t regret anything she admitted.

Chrissy gave Angela her name in full, but Angela didn’t catch it. She told Chrissy her maiden name and that she was going to stay with a family friend in Vancouver while she sorted out her next step. (Jake would look in San Diego; _tía_ Martína was off limits, as were the twins.) Again there was a graveness to Chrissy’s face that took Angela aback as Chrissy nodded in silent approval. It made her look far older than at the start and Angela wondered who was mistaken here: was Chrissy older than she appeared and simply _looked_ young, or the other way around?

Angela couldn’t think of a delicate, nonchalant way to approach the question so she asked about Chrissy’s family instead.

Chrissy and her brother had a turbulent relationship; she was visiting him in Washington, but outside events stirred old troubles and it had been best to cut short the trip. She, like Angela, was fleeing north for breathing space. It disconcerted Angela the way Chrissy chewed her lip in thought. It, like other things, was too familiar. Too raw.

But despite the echoes, Angela couldn’t make herself draw away. She sensed something hunted, and weary, in the girl that spoke so strongly to something in herself. She feel… kindred.

“It’s going to be late when they get there,” Chrissy said. “Do you have arrangements?”

“That family friend lives on the outskirts of North Van. It isn’t far.”

The smile Chrissy gave was warm and unassuming. “I’m going that way too. I’m house-sitting for a friend for a little while. Listen, why don’t we share a cab? I don’t have a lot of spare cash, and it’s not a good idea to get into a cab in a strange city alone late at night. And—” Her eyes grazed the swell of Angela’s belly. “—I couldn’t bear letting a woman in your condition wander aimlessly around Vancouver at night.”

There was something slightly hungry about the way she eyed Angela’s belly—but also a sadness, poorly masked. Something like loss, or maybe longing. It had taken a while, but Angela noticed that every so often, Chrissy’s fingers brushed her own stomach. Mostly she caught them in midair and redirected them to playing with her hair, but once in a while they flattened on her abdomen and the fine lines at the corners of her eyes tightened. It was a look Angela had grown familiar with in the last three months: she saw it in her own face in the mirror every day.

A bloom of pity budded within her. She didn’t doubt Chrissy’s story of a troubled brother but she wondered if there was more to it than that. She had seen too much to think that Chrissy was too young to have troubles.

The transfer to train in Bellingham went smoothly, but when they hit customs trouble arose. The official wanted to see Angela’s passport but she couldn’t find it. She searched _everything_. What if she couldn’t find it? They already looked extra suspiciously at her for being a pregnant woman crossing the border at night, by ground. Where was it? Where _was it?_

She was beginning to panic when Chrissy, next in line behind her, wordlessly bent down. Straightening, she handed Angela the dropped booklet. She was sleepy-eyed but calm as she murmured to the customs official what must have happened: juggling her bags alone, Angela had left the pocket unzipped.

He frowned but snatched the passport from Angela and held it to the light. The details matched her ticket.

She was so relieved she actually started to cry when the train finally pulled through the other side of the border into Canadian territory. It was late; she was hungry and tired; her feet and back ached; and in the space of the last hour she had risen to use the bathroom four times. Embarrassment flooded her face with blood and she tried her best to sob quietly, but she couldn’t stop the hysteria altogether. It might have been, she realised disconnectedly, that she was finally releasing the pent-up emotions of six months of agony.

Chrissy murmured the same thought. After that Angela didn’t try to fight it; she simply tried to keep quiet out of respect for the passengers attempting to sleep. When she ended up with her head on Chrissy’s shoulder, shaking with quiet grief, the girl stroked her hair and let her stay. Angela thought she should have felt coddled, or patronised. Violated, maybe. She had known the girl for all of a few hours. Instead it was soothing. It had been a long time since her mother was around to do this.

She fell asleep sometime after that. Chrissy shook her awake in Vancouver. Angela had slept with her head on Chrissy’s shoulder, forehead against her neck. Hurriedly she sat up, rubbing her mouth, terrified that she had drooled on Chrissy.

The girl’s quirky smile indicated that she understood it, and that Angela hadn’t. With a hot face, Angela levered herself out of her seat. A strange lullaby strummed in her head all the way out of the cavernous, empty waiting hall.

Angela had no compunctions about sharing a taxi now. The prospect of paying the villainous charge and hauling her enormous bags around in the rain was beyond her. And it _was_ raining: a light, misting rain of the sort that settled in for days. If the sky was empathetically ‘washing away her past’, it must have thought she had a lot more baggage than she’d realised.

The taxi took almost an hour to reach the address from her godmother’s last Christmas card. Angela tried not to think of the card from this year that must be sitting, newly arrived, unopened at the post-office. Stricken, she suddenly realised that she was glad she’d thought to have her mail held: if Jake found that card, he might put together where she’d gone. The twins should already have been in San Diego; if that red herring didn’t buy her time…

She wasn’t ready to face him. She might never be. For the third time today, relief crashed over her like a wave.

It lasted until the taxi pulled up in the driveway. The house looked locked up tight. When Angela got out to investigate, a neighbour braving a tenuous ceasefire in the rain to take his garbage bins out informed her that it was no good ringing the bell twenty times. (An exaggeration: she’d only rung three times.)

“There’s nobody home,” he called. “They went off on some two-week Christmas cruise or something to that tune. Caribbean, I think,” he added offhandedly, as if she would be interested in the particulars. “Bad timing, eh?”

“Oh,” Angela stuttered.

He frowned at her. “Hey, you want to come in? You look frozen. The missus will get you some coffee. You can make any calls you need to.”

“Thank you, no,” said Angela faintly. “I’ll be fine.” Feeling dizzy, she returned to the cab. Chrissy and the cabbie were leaning against the side chatting whilst the cabbie smoked.

“No one’s home,” Angela said. “The neighbour says they’ve gone away for a few weeks. A cruise or something.” She put a hand to her forehead, which felt hot and tight. Her mind raced without actually going anywhere. She didn’t have the money for a long-term hotel stay, and she didn’t know how she was going to get a job without a visa and in her condition.

She was twenty-six weeks pregnant. Options were limited. She turned her face to the sky and rain drops pattered her face. She closed her eyes. ‘_God, don’t make me go back_.’

“I can put you up at my place,” Chrissy offered.

Angela was trying to calculate how long it would take her to contact her godmother. “Sure, I’d really appreciate that,” she said absently. Then it sank in.

“Only until you find someplace that suits you better,” Chrissy added, as if sensing Angela’s sudden second thoughts. It was an open-ended offer, she seemed to want to say. Not a contract.

Only now did the thought occur to turn Chrissy down flat. It was too convenient, whispered the suspicious little voice Sam always tried to instil in her. Something caught Angela from rescinding it anyway. “Thank you,” she heard herself say, “That sounds great.”

Grey shadows had begun to appear beneath Chrissy’s eyes. Weariness creased their corners. Her whole bearing exuded an air of fatigued determination to her whole bearing. Tall as she was, with the collar of her surplus coat turned up and an Irish cap pulled low, she should have looked imposing. Instead she just seemed… contained. And expectant. She sensed that Angela wasn’t full decided, despite her words.

Finally Angela identified the feeling inside herself. It was part pity, part empathy and part exhaustion. It was a longing to at last be with somebody who _understood_ and didn’t judge. Emily, Seth, Leah, the twins—they all tripped up in one way or another. Angela was so tired of being alone.

The cabbie cleared his throat and dropped his cigarette butt. “Well, ladies? What’s it gonna be?”

Angela straightened her back. “I would be gratefully,” she said to Chrissy, picking her words with care, “for a place to stay and if you’d be willing to offer it.”

The bone-deep sadness Angela carried lessened just a touch as a cautious smile curved Chrissy’s eyes crinkled. To Angela’s surprise, some of the tension in her stance loosened.

Chrissy had secrets. Angela knew this without having to second-guess herself.

But so did Angela. Everyone was looking for someone whose demons are compatible with their own. In the last hours, she had seen enough glimpses of Chrissy’s to guess the names of a few. Angela can handle those. They were, if not friendly, then familiar.

Chrissy pushed off the cab, doffed her cap, and opened the passenger door with a courtly bow. The crushing weariness of her demeanour a moment before hadn’t evaporated, but it didn’t weigh her to the pavement anymore. “Absolutely, ma’am. It would be my pleasure.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chrissy is an OC from a defunct vamp-centric story who ended up tied into this one and is now difficult to extract. Eventually I'll go back and redact the tie-in bits. Oh well.


	2. #21 Alice In Wonderland

When Angela sought her out the next morning Chrissy was in the apartment’s homey little kitchen. In a loose linen shirt and jean cut-offs (the military coat discarded) she was, wonder of wonders, kneading bread dough. She hummed as she worked. The melody came to Angela like something from childhood, and she recognised it as the tune stuck in her head after waking up on the bus. It sounded foreign, but she couldn’t place it.

The window over the sink was open and a crisp breeze stirred up the smell of a glass pot of herbal tea sitting on the window-sill to brew. It smelled like Madagascan vanilla and spices. A sense of _home_ swept Angela up for a moment.

With her sleeves rolled up and her hair in a loose braid, Chrissy looks almost normal. But she turned just slightly _before_ Angela cleared her throat and even with that cheerful, unassuming smile back in place, she still reminded Angela me of something pulled out of a 20’s film.

“There’ll be fresh ciabatta for lunch,” Chrissy offered. “And if you want, there’s a glorious deli around the corner that sells artesian sodas.”

With Angela’s mind made up, it became plain that there was no mistaking the similarities in their faces—Chrissy and the childwhore. Angela hadn’t imagined it. The mouth was wider—less sharply delineated and pert. The jaw was stronger. But the shape of the eyes was the same.

Angela had woken up that morning unafraid. She hadn’t wanted to confront Chrissy the previous night, and she had been afraid she would lose her nerve. That Chrissy might… not _hurt_ her, but that there would be consequences to ruining the masquerade.

“What are you?” Angela asked flatly. She found herself strangely calm and collected, standing next to this Eater. They had made a mutual decision to be blithe about this.

Chrissy gave her a gentle smile and washed dough from her hands. Reason told Angela that she should be afraid but instinct told her not to be. Not that there was nothing to fear, but that Angela in particular had nothing to fear. She had fallen down a rabbit hole where ‘dangerous’ was normal and ‘safe’ the dream. Yet if she was Alice, what was Chrissy: the Red Queen… or the Hatter?

At last, Chrissy turned drying her hands on a kitchen towel. “A hybrid,” she said, and then explained. Neither one nor the other, human or vampire. “Sometimes called _damphire_,” she added with a grin, “if you’re into RPGs at all.”

Angela wasn’t, but Isaac was. It was a mark of how far she had come in the last seven years that she didn’t automatically go for the knife block on the counter. The thought didn’t even occur to her until later, and then it was accompanied by amusement.

Chrissy didn’t offer anything more about her family. Angela didn’t ask.

“I don’t mind,” said Angela. She proceeded to tell Chrissy how her ex-husband was a shape-shifter, and that she had left to give her daughter a childhood not torn and scarred by the jagged edges of a not-family like her own had been.

Chrissy’s smile shaded a little bitter. “I did the same. I left a daughter with her human father to give her the best chance to live. I’m not always sure it was the kindest decision, but it wasn’t the cruellest.”

“Was it hers?” Angela asked. “That lullaby?”

Pain flashes in Chrissy’s eyes, nakedly this time. “No.”

There were layers to the hurt, Angela guessed. This one was fresher.

They had a lot more talking to do. But for now, the dough needed to be covered by a cloth and left to rise, there was a rare sunny morning outside, and Angela had bags to unpack. If this was the bottom of the rabbit hole, then there was nothing left to do but stride boldly through the mirror and see what the new world offered.

She suspected Chrissy was neither the Queen _nor_ the Hatter. She suspected Chrissy was the Knight, aimless and jovial, wandering purposefully off on her own quest parallel to the plot. Perhaps – not certainly, but _perhaps_ – if they walked a ways together, she would teach Angela how to slay her own Jabberwocky.

Angela reached for two clean mugs and took the teapot from the windowsill. For certain, after the last six months, she was not all there herself. At least with the Knight they could be cheerfully deranged together.

Pouring out a mug for each of them (pausing to glance at Chrissy, who nodded), she asked how far the deli was.


	3. #14 Life

They had thought it would be a daughter. Named her. Rocío.

They’d been so sure; Alpha’s word. (Even if he wasn’t _Angela’s_ Alpha.)

Instead there was Mateo. Tiny and red-faced and squalling, simultaneously one of the ugliest and most beautiful things Angela had ever seen.

She laughed quietly to herself in the soft dark of the hospital room, brushing a fingertip through his baby-fuzz hair as he lay dead to the world in a crib by her bed.

Sam had been wrong. (Again.) And here was this new life, carried clear of the wreck of the old one. Born wet and bloody into the world one brilliantly red afternoon in March, far clear of any worries of war, treaties and divided loyalties.

Angela fought off sleep to stay awake looking at him for as long as possible. Her son. _Her_ son. Smoothing his hair, she murmured his name to the room and he stirred in his sleep.

This was why she had left. This life. Mateo.


	4. #89 Angel

Angela had visited the greengrocers two dozen times before it happened. But on that particular day in May, picking out apples, she turned to put the paper bag into her basket and dropped it. Mateo fussed in the chest carrier. Normally he slept like a hibernating bear but it had been a week of intensely light sleeping for him, and waking him would spark a full meltdown. Angela resumed humming Chrissy’s French lullaby, bouncing him and frowning at the apples.

While she stood wondering how to fix it without waking Mateo, a stranger stepped up to the top of her vision. “Can I help you with those?”

Angela looked up and the resemblance to Jake hit her like a bolt from the blue.

The greengrocers was angled so that the ray of sunlight coming through the doors fell across his cheek and Angela’s bruised apples. He was handsome, with cropped black hair and a gentle smile. He was dressed like a cowboy—or like Angela had learned modern cowboys looked since she and Chrissy moved to Calgary.

Her humming faltered. Mateo whimpered. While she glanced down at him, the cowboy crouched and collected her apples. “Here,” he said quietly, slipping the last apple into the paper bag and putting the whole into Angela’s basket. 

He pitched his voice so as not to wake Mateo. Angela could have kissed him. She kicked the part of her that asked if she wanted to soundly in the shins and smiled at him. “Thank you,” she mouthed as he straightened. “I’m so clumsy this week. This little guy’s been getting me up every hour and my roommate can only soothe him sometimes.”

She struggled to shake off the doppelganger feeling that was like a kick in the chest. His features were softer than Jake’s, off-set with laugh and sun lines, and the frame his jacket hung off was shorter and less bulky.

The cowboy ducked his head to see Mateo’s sleepy, scrunched-up face. “Yeah, they’re a lot of work when they’re this small. Nine weeks?”

“Seven.”

He mimed a whistle and knocked his hat up an inch. “And you’re outside? My sisters couldn’t manage shopping until Week Eight. My hat’s off to you, ma’am. You look great.”

It was that smile which finally drove home that it wasn’t Jake. Even at his gentlest – away from the pack and just drowsily watching her as she pottered around – Jake’s smile was never that friendly and open. That… personable. Jake was goofy, but there was always something guarded about him. Like some part of him had never forgotten how they’d met.

“Thank you,” she said a little awkwardly. “You’re the first to say so for a while.”

“Pretty ladies should hear they look great every day.” Mateo squeaked, and the cowboy grinned at him. “And moms need to hear it even more, because we run ‘em ragged.”

Angela smiled too and bounced Mateo gently to smooth his waking. “I’m tougher than I look. Aren’t I, _mi osito_?” He made a grumpy baby-bear sound.

“Oh, I don’t doubt it,” said the cowboy. “I’m Luke, by the way.”

Angela lifted on hand from the carrier to shake. “Angela. And this is Mateo.”

Luke’s palm was warm and leathery. Calluses ridged the bases of fingers and thumb. Up close, he smelled like coffee, spicy aftershave and grass baking in the sun.

Luke tipped his head. “Hi, Mateo. I hear you’re making your mom sing for her supper this week.” Mateo blinked darkly up at him with long-lashed eyes.

Angela shook her head wryly. “He’s normally sleeps like the dead. He’s just been a little touchy this week. Maybe it’s a growth spurt. Listen, thanks again for the help. I don’t know how I was going to juggle him and clean this up. I normally have someone who shops with me but she’s—otherwise occupied.”

She might have imagined that he looked disappointed. “She? Your…”

“Roommate.”

“No man in your life?” Angela blinked at him. He actually looked flustered, and hurried to add, “Partner? Helper? Heavy lifter?”

Angela laughed at the thought. “You should see my roommate lift the sofa to vacuum.”

“Sorry,” he said ruefully. “That was… kinda forward. Apologies. I’m a little out of the game.”

Angela gestured to the carrier in her arms. “There’s a bit of that going around.”

The smile returned full force and for a moment the air turned to honey. Angela wondered if the shock of thinking she’d run into Jake had shaken her more than she’d thought. “I was about to head to the check-out,” she offered, flustered herself.

“Can I help you with your basket?”

“Oh, no. That’s okay! I’d hate to take you away from your errands anymore.”

“It’s really no trouble.” He reached for the basket when she bit her lip. “Honestly. It’s an excuse to dawdle in town before I get roped into helping my brothers-in-law fix the fences.” He held up the basket, still awaiting permission. Angela caved.

She jiggled Mateo the way he liked as she followed Luke and her groceries to the front. Exactly how long had it been since she met someone she was attracted to?

They’d moved to Calgary to be further from the border. Further from trouble. Chrissy had elected of her own esoteric logic to stick around, and she never questioned Angela’s reasoning—something Angela was grateful for and vaguely in awe of. She knew Chrissy well enough by now to know that Chrissy had her own demons to flee; Angela might not have known all their names, but she heard them scratching at the other woman sometimes, in the way Chrissy fiddled nervously with the radio, or chewed her lips. But it was Angela’s demons they kept moving to escape.

Yet here she was inviting more into her circle.

Luke had struck up a friendly, familiar banter with the clerk as he lined up her groceries for barcoding, exchanging family tidings and gossip of the week just past.

Mateo burbled, pleased to be awake and surrounded by new things. As he wobbled his head around, Angela brushed his black baby-down with her fingertips. Perhaps this was something… new.

Luke glanced back from the checkout as if to make sure she was still there and gave her another brilliant smile. There again: the flutter in her stomach.

“Of course,” she muttered to Mateo as she left with her purchases in a shoulder bag, “Mama would meet an angel in a greengrocers.”


	5. #81 Lust

June blurred into a carousel of bright colours and endorphin highs and Chrissy singing songs Angela didn’t understand to Mateo. Luke didn’t actually work full time on the family farm outside city limits, Angela had learnt. It was purely coincidence that he’d stopped by their shared local greengrocer that afternoon on his way to the farm.

_Kismet_, Angela had told him sagely, and kissed him shyly on the cheek.

Actually, he worked in immigration, and his offer to fast-track her visa application was the reason they were seated here on the sagging couch in his apartment, discussing forms and mocking a bureaucracy that had three forms for something they didn’t need and no form for the one they did. Luke shoved a bit of paper Angela showed him the consultant at the embassy had given her to the back of the table, and laid two others side by side, directing her to the pertinent boxes.

Angela focused on making her handwriting regular. Not on the way their thighs pressed together. Not on Luke’s shoulder brushing hers. Absolutely not on the way his hands, as they gestured and gesticulated, moved like smoke from a campfire, swirling and energetic and _right there_.

She wanted to reach out and run a fingertip over the tendons in his wrist where they stood out.

Her throat was dry. There were cold cans sweating away on coasters on the table (beer for Luke, coke for Angela) but she didn’t think even slugging hers would help. The whole place smelt of Luke: soap, cedar, and sunbaked grass, and fresh spiced cooking in the kitchen.

It wasn’t her fault. She was behaving. Trying to be reserved and proper; _demure_ was Chrissy’s word. Trying to act like she’d had her heart shredded not a year beforehand and _not_ like she was aching to take Luke by the collar and kiss him until the mountains crumbled.

It was all in vain when Luke paused in reaching out to pick up another piece of paper and turned to her instead. Angela pretended to keep reading, but in truth her ears perked up and seemed to strain, as if he _were_ talking but so quietly she could barely hear. Luke merely looked at her. Eventually she raised her head and looked back.

Deadlocked, the distant throb of sounds from outside receded like a tide. Luke made to brush a strand of hair off her face.

She leant away. It wasn’t enough to _want_. She’d learnt that the hard way and even now her heart ached at the thought of an encore. “Why are you doing this?”

Luke smiled uncertainly and withdrew his hand. “Doing what?”

“This.” Angela waved her hand to indicate the table with its layer of paper. “All this.”

Luke was quiet for a long time. Angela began to wonder if the mountains really would crumble while they sat together. She reached for her bag where it lay beside the couch and made to rise.

Luke touched her arm. “I want to help you.”

“You don’t know me,” Angela reminded him. Any second now, she would find out this had all been a joke, or a play. “I could be a harpy, or a serial killer, or a… a _werewolf_. You know _nothing_ about me.”

Luke hesitated and then gave her the smile that sent her spinning around her kitchen at midnight, humming to herself as she baked and Chrissy watched – affectionate and knowing – from the doorway.

“You’ve got the most handsome serial-killer offspring I’ve ever seen,” he said simply.

Angela had to look away to hide a smile.

Luke was still looking at her when she turned back. “I want to help you. I _want_ to know you.” Slowly, very deliberately, he reached out and moved the strand of hair behind her ear. “Because you’re the most beautiful thing I’ve seen all year.”

There was something slightly shadowed behind his eyes, but his smile wasn’t disingenuous. Whatever was troubling him, it didn’t tarnish his reasoning.

Angela wanted to say that she was hardly beautiful: she was exhausted, there were bags under her eyes, she’d had a baby not long enough ago that her body had bounced back, and despite her best efforts her hair was lacklustre and resisted all attempts to put life into it. She wasn’t ‘beautiful’. But the way Luke was looking at her told her maybe she was wrong.

This time she didn’t move away. Luke leaned in to kiss her, and after a moment she touched the side of his face, reciprocating. The paperwork was forgotten on the table.

She tried to remember – even as Luke did his best to make her forget – if Jake had ever said anything like that to her. He’d told her he loved her. He’d told her he needed her. That seeing her turned rainstorms into air, and night into day. But she didn’t think he’d ever told her she was beautiful. Not really. Not in eight years. The acknowledgement was like a knife to her heart, but instead of shying away, she opened to it. She let it in and accepted it, and it made way for something new. The pain assimilated with her acceptance of past lives lived and lost, and a new body germinated and unfurled within her in its stead.


	6. #6 Books

Only practice and the carrier meant Angela didn’t drop Mateo when her phone buzzed. She controlled the urge to scramble for it and pulled it from her pocket sedately.

“Waiting for a text?” Chrissy asked slyly, swanning past to the next book bin.

Angela pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth. It was an upselling offer from her cell provider. She put the phone back into her pocket and turned back to the books on display, bouncing Mateo. He grunted with displeasure and not going anywhere but was placated by the varied colours and textures of book spines.

“You’ve been jumpy ever since you came back from Officer Hottie’s place the other day,” Chrissy teased. She leaned on a bookshelf and caught her tongue between white teeth. “Something you’d like to share?”

Angela ignored her and continued browsing. She’d come out to go secondhand book-shopping, not be interrogated. Pretending she wasn’t bright red, she turned over a paper back and realised in dismay that she’d approached a bin full of Mills & Boons and bodice-rippers. Chrissy’s cackle followed her to the next section. She had tactfully neglected to mention what she might have smelled when Angela returned that day. Nothing had happened beyond a kiss, but Angela remembered distinctly that certain supernaturals could smell… well, things.

Her phone pinged again. Angela nearly strained something controlling herself.

“Oh, check it,” Chrissy drawled. “Don’t be a prude. You like him, he likes you. Mateo likes him. Now all that’s left is to bring him home to Aunty Chrissy so she can vet him properly.”

The old woman at the small bookshop’s counter chuckled in her coffee mug and continued reading horoscopes.

Angela smiled awkwardly at her before turning to Chrissy. “It’s not that serious.” Mateo squawked as she leaned over to pull a slim poetry volume from the centre of a rack. “We’re just…”

Chrissy gasped delightedly and stood on tippy-toes to pull a tatty book from the shelf. With it in hand, she quirked an eyebrow at Angela. “Exploring?” There was that tongue between her teeth again. “_Mamá_’s on an adventure, _mishka,_” she said to Mateo.

Angela rolled her eyes and moved into the stacks. Chrissy might tease her, but Angela knew the immortal had her own accounts to keep and ledgers to balance. When it came down to it, she would support whatever Angela chose.

They lapsed into silent browsing. Mateo occupied himself with sucking his hand. Chrissy drifted past the end of the aisle like dandelion fluff, several slim volumes in hand. Occasionally she cooed at a find.

If Chrissy weren’t paying out her own treasures, even librarian!Angela would be despairing; but she did have a job and she had solemnly sworn not to impose puppy-dog eyes on Angela even once. That said job was hostessing at an exotic club should have fazed Angela, since Chrissy looked barely twenty, but it didn’t. Chrissy had literally lifted a truck to change a tyre out on the interstate, and twice that Angela remembered she had vanished and come back with blood spotting her shirt. She would be fine.

Angela still hadn’t checked her phone. After that first immediacy, the pull faded. She was happy having a drifting day with her boy and her friend.

They had a comfortable life here. Almost half a year after arriving, she had a comfortable apartment on a quiet street, with a tiny kitchen that looked straight over the counter at their squishy blue couch, pot plants, and a store-printed photo of the three of them at the hospital.

And it was hers. Not her mother’s, not Chrissy’s, not Jake’s. Hers. It wasn’t a house haunted by the ghost of her mother, or a cluttered corner of someone else’s den. No TV, phone, or internet except mobile, but she didn’t need more. If work (another bookshop down the street from this one) needed her, they called; if Chrissy needed her, she’d turn around to find the woman behind her with an impish grin.

She still hadn’t told the twins were she was – not trusting Jacob to leave them alone – but she sent photos, and they FaceTimed. Grudgingly, the twins were getting on with their lives under the proviso that she bring their nephew to meet them eventually. They hadn’t seen Jake in months, they swore.

She would go. Eventually. But right now, she had only just settled. The apartment was contracted for twelve months. Mateo was so small the doctor worried about his nutrition, and he still wasn’t sleeping more than two hours at a time, but all his vitals were healthy. He still needed Angela in particular to settle him back to sleep, although Chrissy could hypnotise him (figuratively) for ages with her songs and stories in tongues Angela didn’t know. (She swore Chrissy did it half just to stay in practice.)

Was there space in that for Luke? Mateo spat out his pacifier. Immediately his face wrinkled up. Angela put down a book to catch it from the end of its strap and return it. She stroked his little black head as he repositioned it and settled, but it was a tenuous acceptance. It was almost nap time. They would need to go home soon or he’d start squalling.

Jiggling as she walked, she moved to the final rack that had caught her eye. She hadn’t decided what she would do about Mateo. She didn’t want him to never know his father. It wasn’t right to cut Jake out completely like that. It wasn’t that he was a bad person, or remotely that he’d be a bad father—but the implications of him, of his life… She owed him the right to know his child, but she didn’t own him her own life.

Angela was undecided. But she had time. Her phone buzzed again and she looked down at it.

With a sigh, Chrissy swanned by, collecting Angela’s tidy pile as she went and signalling that she would treat Angela to these. “For gods’ sakes, read your damn messages. You tell him ‘yes’, you tell him ‘not right now’, it isn’t the end of the world. But answer him. That pinging will keep Mateo up.”

On cue, Mateo rejected the pacifier again and looked up at her red-faced. His reedy little bear-cub growl started in his chest.

“Okay, _cielo_,” Angela sighed. “Let’s go.” She bounced more actively and dug out her phone. The last two messages were indeed from Luke.

Angela considered. They didn’t have to go from zero to sixty. They could go slow.

She walked out of the bookshop smiling. Chrissy followed with a cloth bag of books swinging from each elbow.


	7. #40 Forbidden Love

Angela let Luke into the apartment suddenly very self-conscious of her loose hair and post-pregnancy body in a dress that used to fit her better.

Luke kissed her on the cheek. “Hi. You look great.” He held a bag of groceries from the greengrocers where they’d met.

Angela floundered while he took his boots off. How did people flirt now? She’d dated a shapeshifter for over five years, been married to him for nearly two, left the country pregnant to escape… She was sure she wasn’t the best qualified to know about new relationships.

“Thank you.” Face hot, she led him into the living room.

Chrissy had taken Mateo out to the park muttering about butterflies. It was July and green spaces summoned them like magnets. Angela had taken the opportunity to invite Luke over for lunch on his day off. She was re-thinking that decision now.

She took the safe route: directing him to the sofa, she set him up with a beer and continued preparing the food. The distance let her relax. Bantering was easy with the counter and ten feet between them. Luke complimented her on the space, and asked about this knick-knack and that. She didn’t hear him coming over until he was directly across the counter.

The knife jumped when she did and sliced the web of muscle between thumb and forefinger. “_¡Miércoles!_”

Mortified, she ran the thumb under the tap.

Denim rasped behind her and Luke chuckled. “Jesus, you _are_ a mom, aren’t you? Even in Spanish, you swear like a pre-schooler.” A clean cloth pressed over the cut. “Bring it over here and I’ll take a look.”

With his hand warm around hers, he lifted them to the window. Sunlight shone through the clean edge of the skin before blood welled up again. His hand was so warm. Angela tried to speak but her breath was caught in her throat.

Luke didn’t notice. “It’s not as bad as it looks. Hands just bleed a lot. You got a first aid kit around here somewhere?”

He looked up. His pupils had blown out, she noticed. Blood pounding in her ears and her vision a little swimmy, Angela nodded stupidly and then caught herself and gestured with the other hand down the hall.

“Bathroom cabinet. First door on the left.”

He returned with cotton swabs, iodine, and a waterproof patch. Angela had to stand and let him minister her like a child. She could have kicked herself for looking helpless. But, she admitted, it was easier to clean and dress the nick two-handed.

“There,” he said at last. “Be good as new in a few days.” As a final gesture, he turned her hand and kissed the palm before packing up the kit and returning it to the bathroom.

Angela stood speechless in the kitchen. Her skin was buzzing. Her cheeks felt hot. Was this what it was like just before phasing?

When Luke came back, he wouldn’t let her continue with lunch. She had to content herself with taking a stool on the other side and overseeing from her IKEA throne.

“You know your way around a knife, that’s for sure” she observed.

He grinned. “Hunting. Gotta keep the family traditions alive.” He popped a stick of carrot into his mouth and crunched. Angela shivered. “You ever do any hunting?”

She shook her head. “Not me. But my… my ex and his buddies were really into that sort of thing.”

His eyes sharpened. “Oh, nature boys, were they?” he asked as lightly a before.

“Something like that.” Angela scrunched up her nose. “Listen, can we… Can we not talk about him? I know I brought it up, but…”

Luke shrugged. “Sure. Whatever you want. Besides—” He pointed the knife at her hand. “—I think you’re bleeding enough for one day. Wouldn’t want to do you any more damage.”

It took a second to realise he was joking. He didn’t normally delay the smile like that. It was just a different type of humour to the pack, she reasoned, and smiled too. “Right. Yeah, let’s not do that.”

Despite the hiccup, lunch went well. They finished up back on the sofa drinking sweet tea. Angela sat sideways, Luke with his legs stretched out. She wasn’t sure when they’d shifted so her knees pressed his thigh, or when his hand had drifted to rest on top of them. It was somewhere between explaining how her mother ended up married to a preacher, and laughing at a story about Canadian geese chasing his cousin into a pond.

Angela reached out to put her mug down on the table. When she sat back, he was giving her another of those private, intense smiles—the sort he wore when he didn’t expect her to look at him. Angela flashed back to that afternoon in his apartment.

Slowly, giving her every chance to pull away, Luke leaned over and ran his nose up her neck to the soft hair behind her ear. Angela touched the back of his head. They had plenty of time. They could go as fast or slow as she wanted.

With a touch more pressure, she guided his face up to hers and kissed him.

The last time she did this, she wound up pregnant and hurt, abandoned by someone still professing to love her. But now look: she finally had her life moving in a positive direction, a place of her own away from everything that came before, a housemate who adored her _and_ her son. And her son… Her son was the most wondrous thing she had ever touched, ever seen.

But she had only achieved that by being open to new possibilities. What was there to fear in opening up one more?

Luke gripped her knee and let her do what she wanted with his mouth.


	8. #36 Soul

June the next year brought cool summer winds off the Rockies, a pay rise, and Jake. Angela froze beside the bookshop counter.

Jake was here. _Jake_. Jacob Black, the shapeshifter, the Alpha, the Ex—blocking the door and looming over her, her baby, her new lover, and the stroller like an avenging ghost. Mateo was in her arms rugged up like Michelin Man (it was the end of her shift); Luke was at her side (he’d come to take them both for an afternoon at the river). And her ex was in the door way like something from a nightmare. She couldn’t breathe. Perhaps she was having a panic attack.

It had been over eighteen months. She’d thought she was Out. But her old life and her new one had suddenly, catastrophically, collided like a quantum entanglement. There were so many ways this could end—most of them terrible. She felt, bone deep, that spinning coin flipping endlessly in the space between them.

He looked… older. Not unhealthy or gaunt, just… older. Had she herself changed so much in the last year and a half?

She didn’t know if he’d cracked the twins at last, or leveraged the State Department, or simply Minesweeper’d his way across the continent until he caught her scent, but she was suddenly, profoundly aware two facts:

One: the precariousness of her position, and

Two: that Luke could absolutely not be here for what came next.

Mateo squirmed, trying to look around and see what had Mamá and Not-Quite-Dad’s attention. Angela couldn’t move her arms to settle him.

What did Jake want? Had he come to hurt Mateo—to give the childwhore the privilege of being the only mother to his offspring? (Could she even bear offspring?) Had he come to _take_ Mateo? Did he realise Mateo was his, or think the baby was Luke’s? Had he come for them both, to take them home? Was the childwhore dead?

However this quantum knot untangled itself, her soul would tear itself in two. Confronted with the enormity of it all, she returned to the basic questions:

How? Why? What did he think this would accomplish? Most of all, how fucking dare he?

Jake advanced and it all came out spurting out of her mouth:

“Jacob Black, don’t you take another damn step.”


	9. #80 Sacrifice

Jacob had leaned on the twins until they told him she’d picked up a Canadian accent and mentioned the Chinook winds off the Rockies. They’d met the child. They wouldn’t tell him anything about it. Jacob had found that suspicious but he’d been hard-pressed to keep his temper in check even with Seth – the only one willing to go along with his escalating Angela Hunt – at his elbow whispering. It had been thirteen months at that point. Jacob was forced to leave before he was satisfied, unable to continue a civil conversation. But they’d given him a start.

He'd taken that to Embry. Then he’d leaned on Embry too.

That nut took more effort to crack. He had to be smarter about it, too, since Embry wasn’t human but wasn’t his pack, and Sam was taking this insistence none too kindly despite his own history. It took two months to wear him down. Eventually Embry connected Jacob with a friend in the Mounties. Fifteen months.

The Mountie was easier but had a lot of sifting to do. He narrowed it to Alberta. Seventeen months.

Jacob beat pavement on foot the next whole month. He texted Renesmée from the road; sent her photos. But he could never sit still for a full conversation. He had to keep moving. She said she understood, reminded him that she loved him as more than a lover, but the silences got longer, and the texts came less often. Jacob had to keep looking.

He kept going until suburban Calgary, until—

Straight off the street he walked into the bookshop that smelled of lemongrass and old paper just the way Angela liked, and there she was, leaving the counter.

She stared at him with eyes so wide they showed white on every side, clutching a toddler and with another man’s arm around her waist.

At every step, people had told him this was Far: stalking far, Sam far, Cullen far. If she wanted to go, let her. She’d come back eventually. She wasn’t the type to keep herself and their child away forever. But Jacob was going mad without her. Mad knowing, and not knowing; mad with turning circles on the Cullens current turf, and with the constant grind of a life in which _nothing_ changed—not him, not Renesmée, not his pack, or the scenery.

He trusted that if something had gone wrong, Angela would have told the twins, and they would have relented to telling Jacob, because there were still things only he could do. But Angela was his mate. (First, maybe only; he still didn’t know how to quantify what he had with Renesmée.) Her child was also his. Trusting wasn’t enough. He’d needed to _see_.

So here he was. And here was _this:_

His mate, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. A black-haired baby in her arms. A black-haired man with his hands on them both.

In the moment before she noticed him, and froze, she looked happier than he remembered. Plumper, older, but more at peace. The pale drag of their last six months together was gone. A warm softness had taken its place, rounding her jaw the slightest bit and browning her skin. There was more sun here than their old home. Motherhood looked good on her.

Living with Nessie – seeing her, smelling her, breathing her in every day – he’d forgotten how different she was to Angela. If Nessie was sunlight and fresh linen and candy melting on his tongue, Angela was wet leaves and anise and the cutting clarity of water straight from the spring. He’d forgotten how, in the early days, his heart would give a thump every time he saw her; how later even walking into the same room as her leeched the tension from his body. Even as he’d missed her, the exact memory of what it was like to be around her – to be loved by her – had grown dim.

Now it hit him like a rockslide.

Angela said goodbye to an old woman behind the counter, cuddling her child to her chest, and then noticed Jacob and froze. Jacob took in the whole scene in a flashbulb moment. The baby was so small. Angela and her stranger looked so comfortable. Maybe the kid wasn’t Jacob’s. Maybe he’d been supplanted just like Nessie had supplanted _her_. Maybe, like Leah had suggested in her most vicious moment of _shut-the-fuck-up-already,-Imprinted_, Angela had taken care of that first pregnancy and moved on with her life. Maybe he never should have come.

That rockslide kept on coming, and he just couldn’t tell if it was filling in the black hole of missing her or tearing him apart. Like an automaton, he started toward her.

“Jacob Black, don’t you take another damn step!”


	10. #38 War

In the midst of everything, Angela was appalled to learn that her heart had never given up on Jacob and his sudden appearance in the bookshop prompted not a fit of tears or a violent rage, as she had always expected, but a leap of hope. _Maybe he was here to take them back_.

Horrified at herself, she barked at Jacob not to come any closer and put her arms protectively around Mateo. Her new affection and old affliction were at war, it seemed.

Jacob wore only runners, shorts, and a white t-shirt in the summer heat: the wedding ring on a leather thong around his neck was plain as day. It wasn’t one he’d bought the childwhore.

Angela had never filed for divorce and Jacob had never taken off his wedding ring.

Suddenly the anger that had been absent before poured into her like a river breaking its banks. Maybe he was wearing it for the childwhore. Maybe he considered himself married to the Cullen-Swan waif now, and he’d simply come to rectify a loose end. He frowned at Mateo as if wrangling with algebra; it set off all of her alarm bells and several newly-minted Mother Instincts.

“Luke,” she said, struggling to speak levelly and resettling Mateo on her hip, “I need you to go, please.”

“Who is this?” Luke asked at the same time Jacob said,

“Ange—”

Mateo made his angry grumble and pushed against her neck. She was holding him too tightly.

“Luke,” she repeated, easing her grip on Mateo, “go please.” Panic, fear, and anger were at war within her and even if Luke couldn’t smell it, Jacob sure as heck would. “Jacob, do _not_ call me ‘Ange’.”

“This is your ex, isn’t it,” said Luke.

Angela couldn’t make out his tone and didn’t have the time to puzzle it out. A plan was rapidly coming together in her head. “Yes, it is,” she said smoothly, “and I need some time to talk to him alone. Helen, this is Jacob, my ex-husband. We’re going to go and talk on the back deck.”

“All right, love,” said the old woman doubtfully. “You want me to watch Mattie?”

“I can take him,” Luke offered, reaching out.

Angela didn’t loosen her arms. She didn’t let on that she noticed Jacob’s lip curl at the suggestion, and told herself that wasn’t why she held onto her son. Jacob was here for his kid. Well, let him meet his kid. She didn’t think he’d get violent but Helen would surely eavesdrop anyway and call the police if voices were raised. “No. I want to introduce him to Jacob.”

None of the other three looked happy.

“Luke,” she said, starting with the easiest. “I’ll call you later. I’m sorry, but I need to deal with this right now.”

The oscillating fan beyond the door swung back in its lazy arc and blew air directly around Jacob toward them. It washed Angela with musk, sweat, and the smell that had only ever been ‘Jake’. She tried not to inhale deeply. How long had it been since—

Luke’s pupils had blown out and the colour drained a little from his face. “Ange—”

Jacob rumbled a growl and Angela remembered un-fondly the constant worry that someone would discover his true nature.

“—I’m not comfortable leaving you alone here.”

She was 70% sure the nickname had been a territorial play. “I’m not alone. Helen’s here.” Helen quirked eyebrows over her glasses and waved. “And so is Mateo.” Angela bounced him at Luke, who made a face out of habit. Mateo chuckled.

Jacob shifted his weight and folded his arms. Luke’s smile disappeared like a magic trick.

“Go,” Angela said gently. “We’ll be fine. I’ll call you later.”

“Yeah, ‘_bud’_,” said Jacob snidely. “The lady said go. So go.”

“_Jake_,” Angela scolded, and then wanted to spit for the feel of the nickname in her mouth. He had that fighting light in his eyes.

She was surprised to see a vein jump in Luke’s temple. He was usually one of the most laidback men she’d ever met. “Luke…” She put a hand on his waist. His gaze returned to her, softening. “He talks a big talk, but he would never hurt me or Mateo. Trust me. Look, let’s make this simple. Luke, Helen, this is my ex-husband Jacob. Jacob—” He frowned to hear his full name. “—my boss Helen. And my partner Luke.”

“Howdy,” said Helen, tipping an imaginary hat and enjoying the drama immensely.

Jacob’s manners, if nothing else, had been improved by eighteen months with the vampires: he nodded politely to Helen. Then, as if sticking it into a mouldering cadaver, he offered a hand to Luke.

Luke leaned out to take it. She thought maybe she imagined a creak of bone as they shook briefly.

“And this,” she said, turning to angle her son around, “is Mateo.”

For the first time, he looked Jacob full up in the face. Jacob froze. Should have opened with that, Angela thought regretfully.

“All right, you win,” Luke said while Jacob stared. “I’ll leave you and… him to talk.” Angela had the impression he’d been about to say something else, and didn’t begrudge him that. He leaned over and kissed her full on the mouth. “Love you.”

That was 100% territorial. “Love you too,” she echoed with unaccustomed awkwardness.

Stiff-backed, Luke shouldered past Jacob out the door. Jacob stiffened as he passed.

Angela was not so far from their past that she had forgotten what a wolf doing their level best not to openly snarl and posture looked like. Her eyebrows rose. “Jacob.”

He looked unwillingly away from the door.

“This way.” She turned the stroller and pushed it ahead of her into the back of the shop.

“Whose is he?”

The question pulled her up short. She glanced back to see he hadn’t shifted from the entrance. Helen was theatrically frowning at a newspaper sudoku and tapping her lip with the pen.

Angela sighed. “Jacob—”

“Is he—” He sounded distressed, and there would be no shifting him until he had answers. He and Luke looked similar enough that Mateo could just be big for his age, she supposed. At a stretch.

“Mine.” She was keenly aware of Helen listening to every word. The woman wasn’t a gossip, but it made the preacher’s daughter in Angela uncomfortable to be airing her laundry like this. “Come on,” she said to Jacob. “We’ll talk out on the deck. I’ll make us some coffee.”

He didn’t budge: a flicker of irritation, but also… fear? “Yours and…?”

She hated herself for pitying him the little whine at the end. He had done far worse to her. “Come outside.”


	11. #41 Fantasy

In the space between directing Jacob outside and sitting down with the coffee, Angela slipped unwillingly into a little fantasy. It had all been a big mistake; he’d come to take them back.

He would tell her it had all been wrong; it was time to come home, be a family again. Everything would go back to the way it had been and they would live out their days as a happy little family. Mateo burbled as she fetched down coffee mugs and put the percolator on. She kissed his forehead.

She couldn’t go back to her mother’s house, but perhaps something small. Cosy. A little three-bedroom close to the forest. It would have big windows and a spare bedroom for when the twins came to stay. White walls, green eaves. Stained glass panels in the front windows. A wide, covered deck out the back that looked out into the forest and a tidy kitchen that overlooked the garden where Mateo would play.

It would be close to the sea, so they could always hear the waves, and close to the pack. They would fill it with books and carvings and laughter. It would always smell like mint, fresh linen, and baking just out of the oven.

She knew she ought to scold herself. It was a childish dream, one she ought to have out-grown. She had Mateo, and Chrissy, and Luke. She had herself.

She didn’t need Jake. Didn’t _want_ Jake. …did she?

Outside, Jacob stood at the edge of the deck with hands in his pocket looking at the gravel patch in the tiny lawn and the garden gnomes and dragon statuettes along the wooden fence. Helen lived above the bookstore: her sense of the magical mundane was everywhere. Jacob glanced back as if sensing Angela’s eyes on him. A sun-catcher on the window turned his face orange and then blue as he shifted his weight. It wasn’t possible that he’d gotten taller, or wider. But the eighteen months between them clearly showed. They were in the lines around his eyes, the thinning of his mouth, the set of his shoulders.

It was a fantasy to think nothing had changed.


	12. #54 Dangerous

While the coffee brewed, Angela’s mind raced ahead to conversation bearing down like a Mack truck. Mateo tugged one of her ponytails. She disentangled his little hand without looking.

She’d been building a life here: the bookstore, the apartment, Chrissy, Luke. She and Luke had been together for over a year. There was a real possibility of a life together. They’d even started talking about buying a property in the Yukon. Luke had been a driving force, finding listings, researching towns; they’d looked at a few lodges and hunter’s cabins; floated ideas how to finance themselves up there… Luke was an excellent outdoorsman despite his office job; he’d tentatively mentioned setting up an outdoor adventures/survival bootcamp type thing. Meanwhile, Angela and Chrissy had been working up a stock portfolio.

All of that, Angela thought as she put milk and sugar in each mug, and it had all scattered to the four corners the second she laid eyes on him. Her little mosaic, blown apart. Suddenly nothing she had worked for seemed worth a damn.

She wanted to sit herself down and box her own ears for thinking it. What garbage. The coffee was finished. She pulled the pot free.

He’d literally left her for a child. Pregnant.

But it was _Jake_. Not her first love, but the truest. The one who’d brought magic into the world. The one whose kiss made her dizzy, who rubbed her belly when she was cramping, who carved a wooden charm for her every year they were together. The one who’d said ‘I do’ and meant it. The father of her child.

The coffee pot dropped from her hand. _The father of her child_.

Mateo started at the smash and began a hiccupping cry. Instinctually Angela hugged him, squeezing so hard that he screeched.

Jacob appeared behind them on high alert. “Angela? Are you okay? What happened? Is Mateo hurt?” He looked down and saw the spray of coffee and glass. Before she could protest, he’d swept her and Mateo up and carried them outside. She’d forgotten how effortless the shifters’ strength was. Mateo screamed.

“Angela?” came an alarmed call from inside.

Jacob set them down on a bench beside the barbeque table and sat beside them.

“We’re fine,” Angela called dizzily to Helen. “My hand slipped and I dropped the coffee.” She bounced Mateo to soothe him. He keened up at her.

Helen stuck her head outside and saw that Angela and Mateo were fine. Giving Jacob the evil eye, she withdrew to clean up the spill. Angela rocked Mateo, struggling to breathe. The wedding band over Jacob’s shirt glinted malevolently.

Jacob reached for her. She shrank away, hugging Mateo to her chest.

Jacob had Imprinted on a vampire. Hybrid. Whatever. Chrissy had been able to bear a child, but what if the childwhore couldn’t? Jacob was Mateo’s father, and First Nations, and biologically a _wolf_. Angela had brought Mateo out of the States without permission. She and Jacob were legally married.

At the start, she had just wanted to get as far away as possible; later she hadn’t wanted to give him any clue where she was. They had never gotten a divorce, and she’d put his name on Mateo’s birth certificate.

He had rights to Mateo. And if he knew that, he would claim them.

_Miércoles_.

“Ange?”

She jumped and looked up at him guiltily.

The studied patient expression he was giving her must have been learned to deal with the young wolves. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah.” It came out unnaturally high. “We’re fine.”

“Right.” He didn’t sound convinced. “So about Mateo…”

He didn’t know much about babies. Luke had been around for over a year. Mateo was small for his age. Luke treated Mateo as his own, and Mateo probably smelled of him.

“He’s yours,” said Jacob. “And…?”

If he knew, he would take Mateo away. Wolves belonged with wolves.

In another universe, she told him the truth. They had a civil conversation about how he only wanted to know she was healthy and happy, and that he and the Other One aren’t ready for children. They hugged and agreed to meet later to talk more and discuss regular visits, since his home life was not child-friendly.

This was not that universe.

Angela thumbed her son’s cheek and he looked up at her with his big round bear eyes, black hair baby-soft against her fingers. “Luke’s. He’s mine and Luke’s.” She couldn’t look Jacob in the face so she kept looking at Mateo. “I miscarried just after I left. The stress.”

Jacob got up and walked away.

If she didn’t look at his face, she could watch him pace. His chest expanded with deep inhalations. His back arched stiffly. Descending from the deck, he stood beside the gravel patch and put a hand on the fence. He was, she judged from past experience, trying very hard not to phase.

The fence rattled all along its length with his punch.

Angela was aware of walking a very fine, dangerous line. The fence held even though its posts trembled.

Her ex-husband approached the deck, his eyes very bright, blinking too rapidly up at her. “The baby, our— Was it… Did you…”

“It was so soon.” Angela could barely breathe to speak. “So small. I’m sorry, Jacob.”

Suspicion gave him a reason to narrow his eyes and hide the tears. Angela let herself well up too. She grieved for the past just like him; the tears weren’t a lie. His gaze dropped to Mateo.

She wasn’t so naïve or foolish as to declare herself unafraid of him; she’d seen what shapeshifters could do. But she didn’t think he’d hurt her or Mateo, if for no reason more than that she genuinely believed that in some part of him, he still loved her. And Mateo was part of her.

Jacob’s nostrils flared. He could probably smell that trace of fear. But he was crying. Standing at the edge of the deck, looking up at her and Mateo, he was crying. For their loss, their life, for the death of his first, Angela didn’t know. It didn’t seem to matter.

Again pity wrenched in her chest. But if he knew…

She wanted to reach for him. Her hand tightened on Mateo’s fat little leg.

“I’m sorry, Ange,” Jacob said thickly. “I’m sorry you went through that. And I’m sorry you went through it alone.” Loosely, he clasped her bare ankle.

Angela had to close her eyes and rest her lips on Mateo’s head. She didn’t worry about the tears on her cheeks. If this blew up in her face, it would go thermonuclear.


	13. #60 Dusk

Worn out by the emotional toll of what happened at the bookstore, she’d had to call Luke and raincheck their afternoon. He’d blessedly given her all the time she wanted. She hadn’t wanted the few days he’d offered, but the desire to kiss him for making the offer in the first place had nearly been enough to ask him to come to the apartment that night.

She’d held off though. Priority went to introducing Jacob and Chrissy, so that neither killed the other accidentally, then settling Mateo. Delaying his nap threw off their whole routine.

On a blanket in a field outside Calgary the next evening, she gave Luke the key points. Chrissy had Mateo back in town. She was, Angela suspected, warily allowing Jacob to spend some time with the child on the sly. (Not that it had been expressly forbidden but it hadn’t been the plan.) In any case, the result was that Angela and Luke had an uncommon night to themselves.

They lay on a hill some distance from the farmhouse, watching the sun sink. Part of the farm’s herd grazed below them; Angela could hear horses whicker and snort, and the breeze carried their warm, musty smell up the hill with the sweet smell of greening grass. She lay with her head on Luke’s shoulder, her hand in his over his heart.

“So what happens next?” Luke asked drowsily.

“We agreed to meet in the park tomorrow, to talk properly.”

“You want me to request some time off work? Go with you?”

Angela twitched her head against his chin. “No, it’s okay. Chrissy will go with me. And I told you, you don’t need to worry about him. He would never—”

“Hurt you?” Luke said sardonically. “Again, you mean?”

“That wasn’t… his fault,” Angela said softly. “He never wanted it to be like that.”

“Yeah, and my cousin never wanted to knock up his best friend’s old lady either, but shit happens,” said Luke philosophically.

Angela had nothing to say to that. She wasn’t distant enough yet be philosophical about it; even Leah hadn’t been so deep when it happened to her, so as far as Angela knew, she was in unmapped territory. “He just came to see that I’m okay,” she said after a moment’s silence. “We didn’t leave things well. He wanted to know about the baby.”

Luke’s eyes were still closed as he chewed a grass stalk. “What did you tell him?”

She hadn’t yet figured out how to broach this. She wondered how he would take it, and then decided to shoot straight. “I told him Mateo was yours.”

Luke cracked his eyes open. “Oh?”

Angela bit her lip, lifting up her head to better see his reaction. The grass stem stilled and then started shivering again and he closed his eyes. “How’d he react to that?”

“He seems to believe it. Mateo’s small and I wasn’t far along when I left. …” She hesitated and then went on. “Luke, this doesn’t mean I expect you to claim him. I’m not expecting anything more from you now that I did before Jake showed up. It’s just… things are complicated where we come from. He comes from.”

“Something to do with his tribe,” Luke guessed mildly.

Angela paused. But that could mean anything. It didn’t mean he knew. “Yes. Something like that.”

“You know, that’s the second time you’ve called him Jake since he came back,” Luke observed. “Who did you say his people are?”

Angela tried not to tense up. “I didn’t. Quileute. He’s Quileute.”

“Mm. So Mateo is Quileute too. And no blood on your side?”

Angela shook her head. “Not that I’m aware of. My mom was Argentinian, so she might have some native blood from down there, but I don’t know. Why?”

Luke opened his eyes and looked up at her, pushing her hair behind her ear and cupping her face. After a moment, he smiled. “Just interested in you. Come on, lie down. We’re out here to relax.” The hand he had behind her back settled heavily on her waist. “I’m happy to claim Mateo. Anything that comes from you is welcome in my life. I want _you_, Angela Weber. I’ll take anything that involves.”

A year after the first time, it still sent warmth right through her to hear it. “Say it again,” she commanded softly.

Luke gave her that dark-eyed smile. “I want you, Angela Weber.”

“No, the second bit.”

“I’ll do anything it takes to have you.”

Angela bent to kiss him and let him pull her down. The sun sank toward the horizon.

“So,” Luke asked lightly as they lay catching their breath. “How did you meet him?”

Angela squinted over at him. His tone was conversational, and it immediately put her on guard. “What a weird time to ask about my ex,” she joked.

When he didn’t withdraw the question or explain it away, her suspicion intensified. He had never really shown much interest in her ex-husband beyond the basics: they had dated for a long time, been married under a year, then he’d left her for another woman, leaving her with Mateo and a fervent desire to leave the country. He’d always seemed to care more that she was available and with him now.

“We met at a bonfire on the Rez, like I told you,” she said evasively. “A bunch of us often met up out there.”

Luke was preparing another grass stalk for chewing, splitting the dry layers off with his teeth. “But Jacob specifically. What was it about him? What singled him out from the pack?”

The word choice put her hackles up. It had been too strange a day for this.

She propped herself up on an elbow. “Are you getting at something?”

Luke spat out fragments of dry grass. “Nope,” he said shortly. “Just curious.”

Angela wasn’t so sure. He’d been oddly changeable all day: irritable one minute, then affectionate or distant the next. Initially she’d thought it was just her ex showing up, but perhaps not. “Why the sudden interest?”

Luke threw away the grass stalk and rolled away. “My—girlfriend’s ex shows up unannounced and looking for his kid, and I’m not allowed to be curious?” he said irritably. He got to his feet and started pulling his jeans on.

Angela sat up, taking her unbuttoned shirt with her to cover her chest. “Of course you are,” she said carefully. “I’m sorry. I just get a bit nervous when people start asking questions about Ja—Jacob. Old habits.”

Luke heaved a sigh and turned back. “No, I’m sorry. I know it was a bad situation you left. I don’t mean to stir up old fires. I’ve just got a lot on my mind. This was the last thing I needed.” He ran both his hands through his hair. “The ceremony’s in a few days. You know it makes us antsy when it’s coming up.” Crouching, he took her hand and kissed it where a small scar crossed the web between forefinger and thumb. “That’s not an excuse. I know you’re dealing with a lot too.”

Angela closed her hand around his and smiled reassuringly. “It’s okay. On the scale of meltdowns I’ve seen, I think that one was mild and justified. Mateo’s got you beat, easily. So,” she added, trying to inject a little levity, “when do I get to come and meet the family at one of these infamous ceremonies?”

Luke abruptly dropped her hand and straightened. “It’s a First Nations thing.”

Angela was taken aback by his vehemence. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realise it was a strict No Outsiders thing.”

Luke paced briefly and then crouched again. “No, it’s okay. I should have told you.” Like a puppy seeking forgiveness, he sought out her hand again. Angela let him take it, a little warily this time.

“Actually,” Luke said, “that’s part of why this one is such a big deal. I’m… going to talk to some people about bringing you in. To include you in the next one.”

Angela didn’t hide the curiosity that brightened her face. “Really? You can do that?”

Luke smiled and leaned in to nudge her nose with his. “I hope so. I’m going to talk to the Elders about it at this one. I think you’d really enjoy them. They’re… they’re something really special. You’re actually perfect for it.”

“Oh, I’m perfect?” Angela teased.

“I’ll say it as many times as you want to hear it,” Luke said, leaning in until she felt his breath warm on her lips.

Angela grinned and raised an eyebrow. “What are you trying to say, Officer?” she said archly. She let Luke press her back into the blanket and lean over her.

“I’m trying to say, Miss Weber—” He pulled her shirt away from her chest. “—that I enjoy having you in my life.” He lowered himself down on top of her. “And that I want you in my life for a very long time. You—” A butterfly kiss on her cheek. “—and your gorgeous body—” The other cheek. “—your gorgeous nose—” Said nose. “—and all your gorgeous offspring.”

“_All_ my gorgeous offspring? I’ve got one.”

Luke grinned. “Right. A good start. What do you say to getting a good start on the next one?”

Angela laughed harder as he nuzzled her neck and let him roll them over on the blanket.


	14. #67 Butterfly

Angela had her own hybrid. Jacob stared at the apparition behind the door. The apparition blinked lazily back. The afternoon they met at the bookstore, Angela took him home to meet the rest of her Found Family and, honestly? After the baby, Jacob could not believe what other anvils she expected to drop on him.

“Jacob,” said Angela, “this is Chrissy. My housemate.”

“Hello, Jacob,” said the apparition. It even had Cullen’s sardonic twitch of the eyebrow. Its heart beat unnaturally slow. “Are you waiting for an invitation, or haven’t you lived with vampires that long?”

Jacob considered putting his Imprint on FaceTime and letting her sort this out.

“Chrissy, don’t tease,” said Angela, stepping over the threshold and out of her sandals as Chrissy took Mateo. She glanced back and seemed to realise what had Jacob locked in place like quickset cement. “If you’re wondering,” she said softly, “yes: they’re related. Come in. This in a conversation that can’t be had in a public hallway.”

The women padded barefoot inside and Jacob followed them. He sat obediently on a beat-up blue sofa as directed.

Chrissy set three beers down on the table. “Ange, are you drinking?”

“No,” came the reply from one of the bedrooms. “Mateo’s probably going to want a comfort feed later. Can you put the kettle on, please?”

“Sure.” She popped the caps off two bottles and returned the third to the fridge.

Jacob couldn’t get drunk but the ritual calmed him. Fucking A.

It played out like Supernatural 20 Questions. Who were they, how did they get here, what was their connection to Angela. Chrissy’s reaction to the introduction suggested she’d already known exactly who he was—but if that was so, she gave no further indication. She asked questions as if for the first time. Jacob tried to keep up with the mild, matter-of-fact way she answered them. He imagined this was how secret agents felt, trading barely-veiled shoptalk with foreign spies: a breath away from a knife in the chest but relieved at talking straight.

Angela splashed around in the bathroom bathing Mateo while Chrissy opened another beer. She was the aunt. Close enough. Jacob drained his second beer faster than the first.

He found it absurd the backflips the universe would do to tie everything in his life together: a butterfly flapped its wings in Asia, and his old lady shacked up with the sister of the father of the girl he left her for.

Chrissy watched him drink with unreadable eyes, but she’d evidently heard – or calculated – that his tolerance was abnormal and she wisely didn’t mention alcoholism. Angela knocked something over and cursed in Spanish. Chrissy’s eyes flicked over like she could see through the wall.

Jacob licked his lips. “Does she know?”

“About?” Chrissy asked in amusement. “Me? She figured it out overnight and asked me upfront the day after we met.” _She doesn’t care,_ her expression said. Jacob wondered if that was the only thing Angela ‘didn’t care’ about.

In the bedroom, Mateo complained about being dressed for bed. Angela sang to him. It wasn’t in English, Spanish, or Quileute.

“Algerian French,” said Chrissy, following Jacob’s line of sight. “I left a daughter of my own behind. I’d die to see and hold her again.” Sardonically, she saluted the setting sun through the window with her beer. “But that ship has long since sailed.”

Jacob found the whole thing a little dramatic, and thoroughly in keeping with the whole damn family.

“I meant Luke,” he said to change the subject.

Chrissy looked at him slantways. “Aren’t you a bit far removed to comment on that? Or a bit close.”

Jacob had to think carefully how to proceed there. He had Feelings on the man. Mainly centred on the guy reeking of… Well, Jacob wasn’t exactly sure. Old blood, printer ink, wet carpet, and hay-dust. Predator. Plus something particularly _off_ that Jacob had never smelled before. He wasn’t an expert, but he’d been around the block and he knew Bad News when he scented it.

He rolled the beer in his bottle. “You’ve met him,” he began, feeling out the way as he went. Chrissy inclined her head. “You smelled it.” She seemed to consider carefully before nodding again. “And?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never encountered it before.”

“There’s blood. Meat. And something else.”

“Predator,” Chrissy agreed. “I know. But you smell of Eater too. Luke hasn’t given any indication of being a threat yet."

Jacob was gratified by the ‘yet’. Less so by the stern look she pinned him with straight after.

“But you rather gave up your say, didn’t you, Jacob.” She had a particular way of rounding the syllables of his name like she was rolling caramel around her mouth. He knew enough of the fangers now to guess it was an intentional part of her predator persona, calculated to intimidate. He was under no illusions that he was being vetted for re-admission to Angela’s life, and he resented it. She hadn’t mentioned the ‘I’ word. It dangled between them sharp and precarious as an icicle.

“She’s still my wife.”

“Legally.” Chrissy tapped the arm of her chair. “I thought you had an Imprint.”

There it was. The word broke off brittlely behind her teeth.

A growl rumbled up his chest.

The look she gave him was old and implacable as an Elder at a judicial hearing, yet her tone was unjudgmental. “My concerns are Angela and Mateo, Jacob. Only them. I don’t care what you decide to do back in your world. Your circus, your monkeys. But let Angela be the master and navigator of hers. That’s the least you owe her.”

In the bedroom, Angela made a delighted sound followed by a raspberry, and a hail of giggles from Mateo. “Oh_, ¿esa? ¿Está bien, mi osito?_” More giggles and another raspberry.

Jacob’s throat worked. “He isn’t human.”

“I know,” said Chrissy wearily. “But Angela chose him. Our time in each others’ lives is brief, and it is our choice to make it beautiful or ugly. I choose to support her, not control her. We’re not her parents, or her mates.”

Jacob tried not to bristle but she saw it anyway.

The ghost of a smile spread behind the mouth of her bottle. “Are we, Jacob?”

By the contrivances of the universe, no. But he wasn’t ready to accept it. He finished the bottle and got up for another.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still unbeta'd, so I'd LOVE feedback!


	15. #65 Me, Myself & I

Angela was wary of leaving him alone with her son. She’d left her hybrid to supervise. Jacob peeked up from the play mat in the living room to where Chrissy pottered around the kitchen making tea.

Jacob wasn’t sure what kind of relationship _that_ was: they seemed more tactile and relaxed than roommates. But Angela was with Luke and Chrissy had several things on the burner, judging by all the texts and calls. Either way, she wasn’t Anti-Jacob.

Empathy was the driver behind inviting him over to babysit Mateo with her for the afternoon, he guessed. Angela hadn’t explicitly forbidden it, but he suspected (a little resentfully) that the hybrid had done some advocating for him. Or Angela didn’t know. She was at work, Chrissy had said, and then Luke was taking her out to the farm.

Jacob still had Feelings about that. He didn’t like Angela being alone with the guy, but she’d whelped with him. And as Chrissy had pointed out when Jacob ventured to question the dude’s credentials, Jacob had forfeited his right to comment.

So: babysitting the whelp. If nothing else, he was curious about Angela’s offspring. He’d always known she would make beautiful babies, but he had to hand it to her: Mateo was calendar-worthy. Jacob nudged a fluffy block closer. The kid trilled and grabbed it.

“Well, you’re a quick one,” Jacob grunted. “I’ll give your mom that.”

Mateo perked up and beamed. Jacob had always considered it a blessing that Nessie grew out of her Baby Stage fast, because he didn’t how he would have handled it in the long run. But watching Mateo made him second-guess himself.

With a squishy-eyed grin, Mateo offered Jacob a different block. He had his mother’s mouth, but not her nose. His eyelashes lay very long and dark against his little chipmunk cheeks. _Osito_, Angela called him, and yeah, he looked like a bear cub: fuzzy, roly-poly, and unthreatening.

A knock on the front door whipped Jacob’s head around. Mateo squeaked and lumbered to his feet. Jacob hadn’t thought babies that young could even stand. Before he knew to react, Mateo had gone toddling down the hall toward it.

Jacob lurched to his feet and swept Mateo up instinctually, just as he would have done to Sam’s kid. Chrissy was there a moment later, breezing past to open the door, pay the delivery man, and bring the boxes of Thai inside. She pivoted ready to take Mateo in her free arm.

Jacob could see in her face the moment she realised that he knew. That he could smell it.

Unexpectedly, she didn’t make a fuss. She quietly carried the food through to the kitchen and left him to come in his own time. Jacob slowly carried Mateo back to the living room. Peering into those deep brown eyes, he could see it plainly now. He didn’t know how he hadn’t seen in before.

With Mateo in his arms, he sat down on the play mat. The scent was obvious as burning toast now. It had been masked by milky-sweet Baby; Chrissy’s crisp-sharp tang like lemon juice and sugar; the earthy, familiar smells of Angela and laundry soap. But with his nose to Mateo’s head, it was impossible to miss.

He looked down into the big brown eyes of his son and his son blinked lazily back at him, hypnotised by the eye-contact. Jacob’s eyelashes. Angela’s eyes. Jacob’s nose. Angela’s mouth.

Not a daughter: a son. Their son.

Mateo grew bored of staring and writhed to be put down again. Jacob plonked him in front of the block pile. Head tipped, he watched the boy paw at blocks until he caught one. Though Jacob didn’t check, he suspected Chrissy was watching from the kitchen—tracking him raptorlike as she went about plating their dinner.

“Well?” he said at last, eyes on Mateo.

Chrissy’s tone was as mild as ever: “She was afraid you’d take him from her if you knew.”

Jacob offered his son a hereto untouched block, which was delightedly accepted and bashed against the mat. “He belongs with his mother,” he said just as mildly.

Chrissy brought out bowls for herself and Jacob, and crackers for Mateo. They ate watching him play.


	16. #55 Brave

There was one more hunch Jacob wanted confirmed. He swallowed his Tom Kha. “Have you got any idea what Luke is?”

“I know he’s Other.” Chrissy crunched a peanut reflectively. “What he is specifically… I’ve never encountered that scent before. But his family have a sort of festival every month. It’s stronger after that, even though he washes so much he reeks of soap.”

He downed another mouthful of soup. Mateo craned his neck up to see what he had.

Feeling ridiculous but _knowing, _Jacob asked, “These festivals—they wouldn’t be around the full moon?”

Because Luke, with his soft face and nice smile, smelled like Predator and Wolf.

“Yes, they are. And Angela just texted to say Luke wants to take her to the next one.” She turned her phone to show Jacob.

Maybe Angela wasn’t Jacob’s anymore. Maybe he’d promised himself to let her raise Mateo as she saw fit; there was no guarantee Mateo would phase and no point in destroying their new truce when he could negotiate from stronger ground down the track.

But a real live moon-shifting werewolf was just too dangerous.

“Where’s the farm?”

“Jacob, you don’t know that he’s a threat. He loves her. You can smell it; it smokes off him whenever she’s around.”

“_I_ love her, and I broke her heart.” His bowl clattered as he shoved it onto the table.

Mateo grasped for it. Chrissy put her bowl aside and scooped up Mateo in a move so quick and fluid Jacob almost missed it. Mateo grumbled at being denied the bowl.

“Jacob,” said Chrissy, “I know Mateo is your son but—”

“Actual werewolves,” Jacob interrupted, “or Moon Children, or whatever, aren’t like us, Chrissy. They can’t control themselves. And…” This part angered, sickened, and scared him all at the same time. “If he does love her, well then, she’s human, which means she can be turned. And she’s proven she can have kids.”

It wasn’t possible for Chrissy to pale further, but he was satisfied by the tightening of her fingers around Mateo’s chubby belly.

“You said yourself,” Jacob pressed, “she confronted you the day after you met. Does she know about Luke?”

Chrissy smoothed Mateo’s hair. “I don’t know.”

“She needs to. Chrissy, do you _know_ where the farm is?”

Mateo caught Chrissy’s fingers and she looked down at him. He grabbed for her cheek, patting it and then squeezing. She sighed.

“Yes. We went out for a party after Stampede last year.”

Putting Mateo in Jacob’s lap, she got up. She returned with the address on a bit of paper—and her car keys. Jacob held Mateo in one arm and opened his other hand for them. She only handed them over when he gave her Mateo.

The GPS on Jacob’s phone said it was a fair way out of town, across the prairie.

“_Tu tía va a arrepentir de esto_,” Chrissy whispered to Mateo and rested her cheek on his head.

Watching this, Jacob abruptly felt very isolated. His pack was far away. He would be going alone, leaving even his temporary allies, and entering the territory of an enemy. But it was Angela. Mateo. His people. And protecting his people was what he was built for.

He kissed Mateo’s cheek, hesitated, and then gripped Chrissy’s shoulder too. “Thank you.” He left at a run.

“Jacob!”

Jacob paused with one foot out of the apartment building.

Chrissy stood at the top of the stairs with Mateo on her hip. “It _is_ her life. Find out if he means her harm before you do any yourself.”

He wanted to bare his teeth but she had a point: Jacob and his own kind ought to be a threat to humanity with everything they could do, but they weren’t. “I’ll be sure to ask him nicely,” he said with prettily gritted teeth, “before I kill him. Don’t tell her I’m coming. I want to see his real reaction.”

Chrissy kissed Mateo’s temple and held up a Scout’s Honour sign.


	17. #73 Trapped

Chrissy’s little green car pulled up just as the couple was coming in past the old barn. Angela couldn’t believe when the door opened and Jacob unfolded himself. He slammed the door so hard it didn’t stick and came over the rutted mud already puffing up to speak.

“Hey, bud,” Luke called amiably. “Help you with something?”

Jacob stopped a few paces off, bare feet spread wide. “You can step away from my mate.”

“From your…” Luke chuckled at the same time Angela spit,

“_Excuse_ you?”

Jacob ignored her. “Don’t play dumb, Cujo. I know what you are. Now step away.”

“Jacob,” said Angela, scandalised, “who do you think you are? You can’t just—”

“Think you’re overstepping your bounds there, brother,” said Luke coolly. He squinted at Jacob as if sizing him up.

Angela’s sputtering died off. Her brow wrinkled. “…Cujo? That’s what you always called—”

“Jared and Paul,” Jacob confirmed. His eyes were nailed to Luke. “When they went wild. Does your sweetie know what you are, ‘bud’?”

They had stopped several paces apart just in front of the barn door. It yawned in the sunset like an open mouth threatening to swallow them all. Pieces twitched together in her head. Luke’s diet; the festivals; the dog hair in his truck and the farmhouse even though there wasn’t a dog to be seen…

Rusty as an old gearbox, she turned to Luke.

“I think you’ve out-stayed your welcome, Jacob,” he was saying.

“Luke,” Angela croaked, “tell me you’re human.”

He half-turned, unwilling to put his back to Jacob. “It’s not a big deal. I was going to tell you after this festival. Angela, your housemate is a blood-drinker and your ex is a damn shapeshifter—”

Jacob wore that horrible post-Pack-breakdown smirk. “Tell her you’re a goddamn werewolf, bud.”

“Nobody’s talking to you,” Luke snapped. “Angela, I—”

“Tell her how you want to make her one of you. Tell her how she’s going to eat her meat rare and howl at the moon before she kills her family.”

“Would you shut _up!_” Luke reached out to take Angela’s hand.

She stepped back. “Werewolf.” She tested the word, tasted it.

“Ange,” Luke said, moving closer, “it was always going to be your choice.”

She backed up another step and wobbled on a sunbaked ridge in the road. “But Jacob, you’re a werewolf too…” She saw him shaking his head.

“We’re shapeshifters, Ange. This guy… is a real live full moon werewolf.”

“It’s our life, Angela,” Luke murmured. He held out his hand palm up, crouching a little as he extended it to her. “It’s your life. Yours to choose.”

“As a skin-tearing, man-eating, taint-licking, full moon werewolf?” Jacob chuckled acidly. “Good sell, man.”

“We’re not like that,” said Luke coldly. He regarded Jacob down the length of his nose. “Or are you really going to buy into that white nineteen-forties bullshit? We know how to keep ourselves locked down.” He returned to Angela. “That’s why we have the feast on every moon. Three days to keep ourselves fed and satiated, and then we don’t do any harm.”

“Yeah? Just a simple three-day blood orgy,” said Jacob. “I heard Ange’s invited to the next one. Is that as a future bitch or the feast?”

Angela went cold. There were a lot of weighty accusations being thrown around, but—

“Is that what you meant?” she whispered. “When you said you wanted to ‘include’ me… That you’d eat me?”

“No, of course not!” Luke sounded irritated that wasn’t obvious. “I want you to _join_ us. To be one with us—with me. I thought you wanted that too.”

Angela’s horror mounted. The barn-mouth yawned wider and darker. “And Mateo?”

“He’s too young still,” Luke began reasonably. Then, derisively: “And we’ll have to wait and see if hiss father’s genes manifest—”

“Don’t!” cried Angela.

“I know, Ange,” Jacob told her. “I figured it out in the apartment, and— Don’t look at me like that, Chrissy didn’t spoil. I smelled it. Away from this fucker’s stink—”

Luke let out a snarl that shocked Angela.

“—I smelled it. She just confirmed it.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Luke, suddenly matter-of-fact. “Mateo is Angela’s, and Angela is free to choose.”

He turned to her and suddenly Angela was aware of both of them looming very tall and barely contained. They had, she realised, the same precarious energy. And the same lumened eyes. How had she never noticed Luke’s eyes?

The moon, she realised with a sense of dull inevitability. She was never around him so close to the full moon. Unbidden came a mind’s eye view of the vast expanse of the green plains surrounding the barn, the house, Chrissy’s car, and the two men—and herself pinned at the centre like a bug. She’d run across two countries and several states, and ended right where she started. The weight of it all pressed down on her and she didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or pop.

“Mateo belongs with his people,” Jacob was saying, “his pack, just like Angela.”

“His ‘pack’ _is_ his mother and me,” Luke shot back. “And it isn’t your place to say anymore.”

“She’s my mate and the mother of my child; it’ll _always_ be my place to—”

“Don’t you have a new wife?”

“That’s not the point! Ange is—”

It was inevitable, Angela saw as Luke rounded on his rival with bared human teeth. And Angela had to stay. Chrissy had to stay away to protect Mateo; she couldn’t come and stop them. And Angela didn’t want to leave Jacob here alone. Either man might die.

_Mierda._

She covered her face with her hands and began to laugh.

The men quieted, and then mud cracked underfoot. Fingers drew her hands from her face.

“Angela,” Luke began lowly, at the same time Jacob barked,

“Ange!” and leaped forward.


	18. #72 Fireworks

Luke didn’t get a chance to go for Jacob: the Quileute was out of his clothes and phasing before Luke finished a step. Luke ducked out of the way, preternaturally quick.

Angela thought he would run. Jacob swung around—and Luke swung a 4x4 timber into his muzzle instead. He’d gone for the barn because there were fence-building supplies leaning against it. He lunged aside as Jacob jack-knifed in the air.

The wolf landed so close Angela could smell the warm, gritty fur. “Ja—”

“Angela, run!” shouted Luke.

He couldn’t phase, she realised. His eyes were yellowing but that was as close to transformation as he had come. He really wasn’t like Jacob.

Jacob whipped around, knocking Angela down, and went for Luke again. Luke ducked inside the barn. The wolf leaped after.

Angela lifted her hands from the baked tyre tracks and found them bleeding. Her knees throbbed as well, bared by the little forget-me-not blue cotton dress she’d thought was so cute for a farm date. White noise filled her head. She got to her feet and stumbled to the barn.

Luke had dropped the post and grabbed for the first metal object to hand. Jacob swerved just in time to avoid taking the pitchfork’s tines to the muzzle. Angela clapped a hand to her mouth.

Jacob looped in the confined space under the hayloft. Luke hefted the pitchfork over his shoulder. Muscle bunched and he flung it like a javelin.

Jacob yowled like a demon. He swung his head to bite at the fork sticking in hindquarters. I his distraction, Luke threw open a cupboard.

Jacob yanked the fork out with his teeth. Luke came up cocking a rifle.

“No!” Thrown out of her daze, Angela seized a shovel from a workbench.

Luke levelled the rifle at Jacob as the wolf turned with bloody jowls. Luke’s brown eyes had gone fiercely yellow. The wolf pounced.

Angela smacked the rifle down and the shot ricocheted off the concrete floor. With a yell, Luke shoved her away. Hereto unseen strength took her off the floor and sent her flying across the barn.

She collided with a wall. Thunder boomed dully and stars exploded behind her eyes. Bonelessly she dropped onto a workbench. Dimly she heard a wolf’s howl of outrage and saw the silver flash of the rifle rising again.

Hungry black clawed in. She couldn’t hold on to anything. The crack of another gunshot filling the barn. Her head rang.

The grunts and shouts of grappling slid out of focus. She passed out.


	19. #37 Universe

Angela came to with her mouth pressed into grit and wood. Hard irregular objects pressed up into her belly. She tried to remember how to breathe.

She struggled up to one elbow. Carnage surrounded the workbench she sprawled across. Her arms bled sluggishly from a dozen cuts and scrapes from tools scattered on the bench. Yawning around her was the cavernous space of a barn. Luke’s family’s barn. The farm.

Her vision was fuzzy: her contacts had been dislodged and the light was fading into orange and red. Sunset. Beyond her focal range, something large and reddish was shaking something smaller like a doll.

“Luke?” she called shakily as she felt in her jacket for her glasses case. It was bent. She had to fight it open. “Jake?”

One lens was cracked when she slid her glasses up her nose. The scene came into fractured focus. Jacob was shaking Luke’s body.

Her mind went blank with horror. The wolf swung toward her at her gasp. He bounded over, returning to human in the last steps. Cuts and bruises scattered his body but they were mending as he approached.

“Ange!” He helped her off the workbench so carefully she might have shattered. Angela pushed away from the bench just to show she could stand unassisted. She didn’t need him to touch her. Didn’t want him to.

_‘Oh, Luke.’_

Jacob kept up a patter—explaining, justifying. His nose wrinkled as he moved to hug her and he reeled back. She knew what he was smelling.

She hadn’t really taken in a word he’d said, staring blindly past him at the corpse. The crack in her lens seemed to separate its head from its body. A gunshot wound bled sluggishly in one hip. Otherwise it was whole—except for the throat. Her gorge rose.

She took in the body, the betrayal, what Jacob had done, what she and Luke had done just prior, the knowledge that for over a year she had let him near herself and her son—

Doubling up, her body tried to vomit. Jacob stepped out of the way and scooped her hair back. Nothing came up. She gagged hard.

Jacob rubbed her back. “Sorry you had to see that.” When she straightened with a wrist to her mouth, he moved to block her view. “Don’t look.”

Angela fixated on a tiny white scar on his chest that predated the Wolf. “They’ll be coming,” she said blankly. “The family.”

“You’re right: we should go.” A large hand enveloped hers and another settled on her mid-back.

Tears welled up in Angela’s eyes and she suddenly wanted to sit down and bawl.

Jacob guided them out, snatching up bits of his clothing as they went. Angela couldn’t stop herself looking back at Luke.

“You didn’t have to do that,” she whispered.

“He was going to turn on you. And Mateo.”

“You don’t know that.” She could barely breathe. Her chest felt like something was welling up inside her. Like maybe she had own wolf, who was coming to avenge the murder of her second life. Third. In the forest, she met a wolf and her naïvety died; again in the forest, her wolf met a vampire, and their family life died; now on the plains, her wolf had met another wolf. Her new life lay on the barn floor with its throat out. Three lives. Same ending.

“If I didn’t stop him,” Jacob said, “he might have killed you both.”

The universe was unimaginative and cruel. ‘_History repeats,’_ she thought dizzily. ‘_We’re over the Rubicon and Rome is burning_.’

What would be her next life? Was it her turn to be the wolf? The car ahead of them looked very small and insecure against wolves. Like Angela herself.

Was she angry? Was she sad? Why did her chest feel so tight? Why could she feel her heartbeat in her eyesockets?

“Ange, if you said ‘no’… What do you think he was going to do?” Jacob sounded half terrified by the idea. “And if you said ‘yes’… Do you really want to be what he was?”

“You don’t know what he was.” Black and white spots marched across Angela’s vision. Her blood seemed to pulse thickly through her veins.

“I know he was a predator. I know we’ve killed leeches for less.”

Two years ago, he would have sounded defensive. Now he just sounded stern and regretful.

Angela’s throat worked with a dozen stinging rebuttals. All rang hollow and brittle as bird bones. The angry sadness surged. Suddenly she was fighting to breathe, and she knew what it was.

Not a wolf. ‘_Would you kill _me_?’_

She closed her eyes, gasping against the panic attack.

“Take me home,” she croaked. When she cracked her eyelids, Jacob was hesitating with one hand on the car door. “Back to Mateo and Chrissy.”

An engine roared in the near distance, beyond the hills overlooking the house. Jacob bundled her into the car almost faster than a human could move and peeled out like Luke himself was coming after them. Once moving, he switched the radio on and tuned it to the most soothing channel he could find.

Angela put her head in her hands to the crooning of a late-night country heartbreaker, and concentrated on breathing while her ex drove her home.


	20. #84 Moonlight

It took near a month for the chaos and police inquiries to die down. Jacob absented himself for most of it.

After she’d shaken off the panic on the drive back to Calgary, Angela had called Chrissy. She met them at a park on the opposite side of town to their regular. Kissing Angela’s temple, she handed over Mateo and then vanished to ‘handle it’. Jacob merited only a brief scan to pass as ‘undamaged’. When the vampire was gone, all Angela had been able to tell Jacob was that Chrissy had contacts to get the ball rolling on making the whole mess go away.

Weeks later, Angela curled sideways on the couch where she’d sat to kiss Luke. With a mug of tepid tea in her hands, she watched Jacob watch the moonlit street so she didn’t turn circles over everything. Chrissy had vanished for the night (either for another friend or for a bar). Mateo was asleep in his crib. Luke was dead.

Once again, a near-miss had nearly taken out everything that she’d worked to build. At this point, she just wanted the world to Stop. She needed something familiar to anchor her. Anything. A fixed point that predated these last two years of insanity.

Darkness lay quietly in the apartment. Neither she nor Jacob felt like putting on any lights, and the moonlight pooling through the windows was balm to eyes sore of fluorescents in police stations, medical labs, the kitchen at the farm. She’d had to go out, or they would never have stopped coming after her. The position of Relentless Pursuer was already filled. Angela had no room or energy for more.

Chrissy had gone with her. Still, Angela had been sure they weren’t coming back. Too much death, too close. Afterward she had lain that whole night through with Mateo beside her and cried.

But now Mateo slept placidly in the bedroom, arms splayed and mouth open to the window as if breathing in the moon. Angela wouldn’t say it, but she was almost certain he would phase. His father sat in moonlight in the living room, watching the hours tick by without stirring. She could almost believe he’d forgotten she was there except that his nose twitched whenever she did.

She had no photographs of him. At the time she left, it hadn’t seemed appropriate (or necessary) to bring any. But after so much time, she found herself soaking him in. Cataloguing; memorising. Trying to recall the way she used to know every part of him by heart.

Over the past weeks, the memories had been excavating themselves, flaking off the dust. They weren’t shiny and crisp as they once were, but his image was unmistakable. She still knew him—she’d just forgotten that she did.

She wondered at the fact that she couldn’t seem to wholly let him go. That she wasn’t pregnant any more but looking at him now, dark and quiet, sharply lined in white and silver from the moon, she could feel a phantom kick in her belly. It made her heart ache, but hollowly, like clenching her fist around air. Gone was the piercing intensity of the first months.

Her baby – the baby they should have had together – was sleeping peacefully in the other room and she still couldn’t find the words to actually tell Jacob that Mateo was his. He knew but she had never actually _said_ it. Even she sensed that Mateo smelled of Jacob. Beneath Mateo’s own baby scent, beneath the smell of Angela, of Chrissy, of laundry soap and milk, there was a trace of Jacob that she had never been able to get rid of. Part of her hated it.

Another part of her wondered how it could be that she didn’t want Them – could never go back to that – but she still wanted him, wanted him to be with her and want to be with her and Mateo only. But it was only the distance that let him forget about the Other One for a minute. Only the thousands of miles that let him be close to Angela and profess that it was all he wanted.

_I still love you, Ange._ Maybe. But he wasn’t _in_ love with her.

She got up from the sofa to put the empty mug in the kitchen sink. The air behind her warmed.

Almost imaginary, something brushed her hair. “You should come home,” Jacob murmured. “Really home.”

She wanted to cringe. Her body wanted to lean back the inches that separated them and feel him warm, and solid, and here. Hers.

The mug chinked quietly in the sink. “You know I can’t.”

Hands settled on her shoulders, hot through her thin sweater. Thumbs circled her collarbones. “You don’t belong here—you or Mateo.” He squeezed ever so lightly. Breath stirred her hair like molten metal. “You know, I really believed you at first. That he was Luke’s. That you… that you lost ours. Or aborted it.”

Angela turned in his arms almost angrily. “Aborted?”

Jacob didn’t seem disconcerted to be suddenly face to face, so close she could feel his body heat down to her knees. “Leah suggested it.”

Angela sighed. She refrained from reminding him that Leah had a harsh streak that wouldn’t be out of place on the Arctic tundra. “I would never. I lo—I loved you, Jacob. I loved Mateo. Always.”

His hands drifted to her forearms and resumed their gentle circles. “A boy. We never thought…”

“Sam’s not a fortune teller,” Angela said tiredly. She wanted to pull her arms from his but the gentleness was lulling. Her mind took her back to thousands of times they stood just like this: afternoons in the kitchen, sunny days watching the pack play ball, bonfires on the beach. Heavy evenings when the air congealed with tension and all Angela could do was plot how to keep Jacob’s mind off sex for forty-eight hours while the rut passed and he did his best to lead her astray.

Heat washed under her skin. Her mind shied away from those memories. They were dangerous. She slipped her arms free of his hands and moved away. Slinking back to the sofa, she curled up in the crook of it and pulled a cushion into her lap. She shouldn’t want so badly for him to follow.

“Maybe we don’t belong here,” she heard herself say, “but we don’t belong there.”

Jacob settled onto the other end of the sofa. It sank with his weight and tipped everything toward him. “We could make it work.” He said it like an honest suggestion but even he sounded hopeless.

Angela traced embroidery on the cushion. It wasn’t just him; she wanted something familiar. Solid and safe. Something to remind her that not everything was as tenuous as her belief in Luke, her living arrangement, the stability of the worlds she built. She wanted someone to cuddle her like she did to Chrissy on the woman’s truly bad days, and to Mateo when he was fussy and restless.

Jacob turned his head toward her. Angela looked past him to the window he’d haunted. A car passed in the street below. She couldn’t see it but she heard the rumble, and a passing glow lit up dust and looping moths.

“Angela.” He stretched along the back of the couch to touch her cheek. She could forget that the last time they spoke before she left Forks, he’d said it with such bitterness and loss.

Desolation was her territory—but here he was, the rain-bringer himself, offering respite from her desert wanderings. Regarding her so softly with Mateo’s deep, dark eyes. Her own eyes.

If she was honest, she didn’t _want_ to remember the way things were. She just wanted a moment to forget. Closing her eyes, she leaned into his hand.

There was only this, this brief photographic frame of time. In this frozen moment she could imagine she had it all again. Against her better judgement, she opened her eyes and Jacob leaned in.

He felt too real under her hands—hair at the nape of his neck bristling her fingers, mouth hungry on hers. This wasn’t a fantasy. She knew that in the morning she would wish it were, but in the moment, it was delirious to have him kissing her again. The world flipped on itself. Everything became surreal. There was no Renesmée; no wolves; no Luke.

For one cold, crystalline moment, suspended as a snowflake in a blizzard, everything was as it had been.


	21. #88 Tea

When she woke in the morning, Jacob was gone.

Angela thought that was for the best. But still, her hands shook until she padded barefoot into the kitchen to make tea and gave them something to do.

Floor boards creaked by the door but all she caught was a flicker of orange skirt as Chrissy flitted back down the hall to answer a waking noise from Mateo. That was for the best too. Angela didn’t think she could handle Chrissy’s thousand-year stare right now, assessing and then accepting Angela’s flawed humanity.

Angela turned away from the counter and rested her back against it. It was the last day of July. Her hair tangled around her ears, heavier on one side with snarls and knots. The tea was slowly warming her fingers through the mug. Cupping it two-handed, she glanced back to check the little windowsill garden. A bright dawn was coming. One tiny succulent was backlit a delicately-translucent green against the first rays, strengthening as she watched. The mug burned through her undershirt where she clasped it to her sternum.

Against the pattern of tiny white roses, her fingers trembled.


	22. #51 Cooking

Night had come again, but the kitchen light was on and Chrissy had already lit up the Christmas tree, claiming the lights were the fundament on which the rest of the decoration turned. Mateo, balanced on her hip chewing a rubber reindeer, agreed.

Angela glanced up from billows of steam and spice at his giggle, her hair piled atop her head and a wooden spoon held up like a sabre. “Please don’t let him get the antlers jammed in his mouth again.”

The vampire nodded and Angela went back to taste-testing her mother’s spicy _Reyes Magos_ stew. It didn’t hurt to get some practice in before the actual day.

“It’s missing something,” she told Chrissy, who hummed. Angela wiped her hand on the batter-streaked apron protecting her sweats.

It was the first week of December and she’d already given up her jeans for more forgiving pants. The gentle convexity of her stomach pushed out against the apron. Thin red scars crisscrossed her arms from landing on the tools, but they were fading—almost invisible. She no longer had to explain them away every other day.

Stirring in another pinch of spice, she bent over the pot. A rich, meaty aroma billowed up.

“Smells great, mama,” said Chrissy. She stood on the other side of the bench bouncing Mateo, who offered his mother his reindeer when he caught her eye. “Think you can leave it for a minute? This decorating thing is a family affair.”

Angela smiled at her son and took the reindeer, then immediately gave it back when he thought better of his generosity and screwed up his face. “I don’t think the range’ll blow up if I let it simmer for a bit.”

She followed them into the obstacle course of boxes strew on floor, sofa, coffee table, and armchair. Mateo reached up for her as Chrissy bent to pick something out of a pouch.

“Ay, _mi vida_. _Ven aquí_.”

Chrissy paused to hand him over. As Angela arranged his legs above her belly, Chrissy straightened and held out an object.

Angela caught her breath. It wasn’t a star, like her mother’s, but it was the same dusty white-and-gold with curling detail. A slim disk the size of her hand encircled the design: a mother polar bear and cub sitting on an ice floe to look up at blazing Polaris. She pressed her cheek to Mateo’s temple.

“It’s beautiful.” New life, new symbols—but guided by the old ones. She welled up, but told herself it was just the hormones.

“_Merci,_” said Chrissy. “I found it in Norway. And….this one’s mine.” Grinning, she held up another flat disk cut through with a design of a bubbling cauldron. “Since your ex thinks I’m a witch.”

Angela couldn’t swallow a laugh fast enough. “He was just grateful that the whole thing was resolved so fast.”

“Yes, well, he still called me a witch, so I’m owning that now.” Still grinning, Chrissy leaned in and rubbed her nose on Mateo’s, to his delighted laugh. “_La tía bruja, dama de las prados_.”

“Don’t encourage him,” Angela said ruefully. “He’s going to have a strange enough life.”

Chrissy shrugged, considering her cauldron, and leaned back to examine the tree as a whole. “Strange is good.” Up on tiptoes, she hung her cauldron just below the tip. “Strange is interesting, and full of possibility.” Returning, she chucked Mateo under her thumb and smiled. “Right, mishka? Double, double, toil and trouble, potion boil and cauldron bubble.”

Angela rubbed her belly. Double, double. “We could use less toil and trouble.”

Chrissy put her arms around Angela’s waist and her chin on Angela’s shoulder. Eye to eye with Mateo, she made a face at him. He patted her cheek appreciatively.

“Whatever comes,” she said normally, “whatever the universe is cooking up… We’ll handle it. So—are you going to put that up or just hold onto it for the next four weeks?”

“Hush,” said Angela. Balancing Mateo, she stepped up to the tree and hooked the decoration onto a branch at eye-level, just under a cluster of twinkling lights. “You can’t rush artistry.”

Chrissy muttered something in French to Mateo that might have been _your mother has delusions of grandeur,_ and went to stir the stew. Angela stayed to look at the tree. It was only half-finished, but they had the whole night. She tilted her head. Chrissy was right: lighting it up at the start did lend it a strange sort of inviting incompleteness.

In the kitchen, Chrissy started humming. Mateo was gumming his reindeer again. Angela looked at one and then the other, and then back at the tree. In a moment, she was conscious of the smell of her mother’s stew, and fresh spruce; the firmness of her stomach and her son’s gentle kicks as he gnawed. She saw clearly the lights on the tree, the busted blue couch, and Chrissy’s enamelled hair pin. There was music in the simmering pots, Chrissy’s lullaby, and dim Christmas carols from the apartment down the hall. Her bare feet were cool on the wooden floor because she’d forgotten to bring her slippers from the bedroom again, but her chest was warm against Mateo.

And she was happy. This was her life—and it was wonderful.

She didn’t need Jake. It had taken many, many cycles to see that; and she was sure once the next Little One arrived, she would need a reminder, but for now: she was fine. More than.

And whatever came next – however history tried to repeat itself – she would handle.

That was what she did, every time.


End file.
